If the trailers are anything to go by, we already know where to find fantastic beasts: Eddie Redmayne has a suitcase full of them in 1926 New York. But where did they come from, the dragons, unicorns and hippogriffs of the Harry Potter universe? Monsters and mythical beasts perform a role in JK Rowling’s work which transcends that of world-building: they add symbolic and psychological depth, as well as reminding us that we are visiting a magical place. Rowling is both an inventor and archivist of fantastical animals, populating her universe with a mixture of what one might term ‘classic monsters’ (trolls, centaurs, mer-people) and folklore staples (bowtruckles, erklings), alongside her own inventions (dementors).

Some of these collected monsters are vastly better known than others: grindylows and boggarts, for example, have origins in Celtic and English folklore, but they are hardly household names. These relatively minor creatures often have a less-than-fantastical backstory: grindylows live in shallow water and threaten to grab at children with their green, reed-like arms. It isn’t difficult to see here both an explanation for the existence of the grindylow – it shares many characteristics with water plants, which are usually mobile and thus have their own disquieting appearance – and an explanation for why such stories might thrive – as a warning from parents to their children to keep away from a potential hazard, even if the risk was more likely to come from drowning than a malevolent water sprite.

But the vast majority of Rowling’s best-loved monsters have winged their way from the Ancient World to her modern, magical one. Fawkes the Phoenix is not only a fantastic beast, capable of auto-regeneration, he’s also a historical one. His colouring – red and gold – is the same as that of the phoenixes mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories from the Fifth Century BCE. Herodotus is known as the ‘father of history’ and, by his critics, as the ‘father of lies’. He reports what he is told by people he meets on his travels, often without the presentation of further evidence. In this instance, he’s told that phoenixes live in Egypt, so he relays this information to his readers. He does add that he hasn’t seen the creature himself, only pictures of one.

Even the more critical Roman historian, Tacitus, reports on a phoenix-sighting, again in Egypt, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius in the First Century CE. Tacitus found some disagreement about the bird’s lifespan, but says it is generally held to live for around 500 years. His sources are unanimous on the subject of the bird’s beak and the colour of its plumage, however: all agree that it differs from every other bird, and is sacred to the sun. Interestingly, Tacitus and Herodotus suggest not that a phoenix is reborn from its own flames, but that a young phoenix will carry the body of its parent bird some considerable distance and then bury it. Though even as he tells us the story, Herodotus describes this particular element as ou pista – unbelievable.

Another Harry Potter animal who has undergone changes to his fantastical nature is the multi-headed dog. Cerberus, the dog who guards the entrance to the Underworld in Greek myth, is a dog of many talents but no fixed number of heads. The poet Hesiod reckoned he was a 50-headed beast, and Pindar was more ambitious still, suggesting a hundred heads. Later Greek and Roman writers usually go for three, although vase painters – there’s a beautiful example of Cerberus on a vase in the Louvre – often depict him with two. Perhaps two heads are better than three, when it comes to painting them. However many heads he has, Cerberus has one thing in common with Fluffy, the three-headed dog in the first Harry Potter novel: both are distracted by music.

Cerberus is a discerning dog, and it takes the lyre-playing of no less a musician than Orpheus to paralyse him (as Virgil tells us in The Georgics), holding his three mouths agape. Fluffy is an easier audience, and can be lulled to sleep by a mere enchanted harp. In a nod to the Cerberus myth, Rowling employs Fluffy as a guard-dog, lying atop the trapdoor which leads Harry, Ron and Hermione on their search for the philosopher’s stone. Are we meant to wonder if the children are entering the gates of hell? Certainly they undergo trials which wouldn’t be out of place in the underworld of Greek myth: the torturous puzzles, the physical peril, the emotional trauma.

Global mythmaking

The philosopher’s stone itself has its roots in both myth and history: Dumbledore’s friend and the stone’s inventor, Nicolas Flamel, was a real scribe who lived in Paris in the 14th Century. Many years after Flamel’s death, he was said to have discovered the secret to eternal life: later writers attributed alchemical skills to him but there is no evidence to suggest he actually possessed these. Nonetheless, he has a street named after him in Paris today (as does his wife Pernelle), which is a kind of immortality, at least.

Even dragons – who have twin mythic histories in Europe and Asia, as Rowling observes with the shorter snout and protuberant eyes of her Chinese Fireball dragon – take their name from the Greek word, drakon. And the basilisk which dwells inside the Chamber of Secrets has also taken his name from the Greek: a diminutive form, meaning ‘little king’. Rowling kept the part of the basilisk myth which sees it capable of destroying everything in its path with its toxic force. Happily for her readers, she abandoned the fatal flaw which is detailed by Pliny the Elder in his Natural Histories: for Pliny, the basilisk can be destroyed by the mere smell of a weasel.

Perhaps the most enigmatic monsters at Hogwarts are the centaurs who live in the forbidden forest. They seem to be direct descendants of the centaurs which were believed to have lived on Mount Pelion in Thessaly, in central Greece. Rowling’s centaurs also preferred a woodland home, although they had a reputation for lascivious behaviour which the noble Firenze and his companions have avoided. Firenze himself, with his passion for astrology and education, owes something to the celebrated centaur, Chiron, who was teacher to Achilles, Theseus and other Greek heroes, and was also a renowned astrologer. There is a beautiful fresco, originally from Herculaneum, in the archaeological museum in Naples, which shows Chiron teaching Achilles to play the lyre. His back legs are curled behind him, almost like a dog, while his front legs support his weight and his hands pluck at the lyre strings. It’s a beautiful reminder that human beings have been thinking of mythical beasts for as long as we have been writing, painting and thinking.

Magic and metaphor

Beasts made up of two species – centaurs, mer-people – are a common part of folklore. But even more complex species-mingling occurs sometimes. The hippogriff is a relatively modern creation, dating back to an Italian poem of the early 16th Century. But the combination of griffin (itself a combination of an eagle and a lion) and horse is predicted centuries earlier. In his Eclogues, Virgil describes a scene in which all the usual rules no longer apply: griffins will mate with mares, he says, and fearful deer will drink next to hounds. The very existence of a hippogriff is presented as an impossibility, not because of their fantastical nature, but because of the well-known animosity (to Virgil’s audience, at least) that existed between horses and griffins.

One interesting point is to consider the monsters and beasts which Rowling has not used, most notably the satyrs and nymphs which populate so much Greek myth. (The French witch Fleur mentions that wood nymphs are used as Christmas decorations at the Beauxbatons school, but they seem to have no other role). It’s this as much as anything that makes us think about the symbolic purpose of the mythic creatures in Harry Potter. Harry’s world – perhaps surprisingly for one filled with teenagers – is largely devoid of sex: there is some kissing, but the predation which satyrs represent is absent. Even the girl who shares a name with the passive Greek nymphs, Nymphadora Tonks, shares little else with them, besides an ability to change appearance (and usually when this happens to a nymph, it is because she is trying to avoid a lusty satyr, rather than battle evil).

Other creatures serve allegorical purposes too: elves have been much grander elsewhere than in Rowling’s work (think of the superiority and otherness of the elves in Tolkien’s work, for example). Rowling’s house-elves are a clear reminder of slavery and servitude. Similarly, centaurs and giants suffer under Umbridge’s domination of Hogwarts, since they are regarded as less than human. Species-ism stands in for racism very easily.

It is worth noting that although dragons and basilisks put Harry and his friends in physical peril, the scariest creatures in the Potter universe are the dementors – creatures Rowling invented herself. These may bear some physical similarity to wraiths, and the Black Riders in The Lord of the Rings, but the psychological and emotional damage they cause is their own. Rowling has linked them with her own experience of depression, reminding us (if such reminders were necessary) that the darkest monsters most of us will face are those in our own minds.

Buckingham Palace is to undergo a 10-year refurbishment costing the taxpayer £369m, the Treasury has announced.

The Queen will remain in residence during the work, to begin next April.

Ageing cables, lead pipes, wiring and boilers will be replaced, many for the first time in 60 years, owing to fears about potential fire and water damage.

Tony Johnstone-Burt, Master of the Queen's Household, said phased works offered the "best value for money" while keeping the palace running.

The works will be funded by a temporary increase in the Sovereign Grant, as recommended by the Royal Trustees, who include the prime minister and chancellor.

This funding change will require MPs' approval.

'Absolute disgrace'

Mr Johnstone-Burt said: "We take the responsibility that comes with receiving these public funds extremely seriously indeed; equally, we are convinced that by making this investment in Buckingham Palace now we can avert a much more costly and potentially catastrophic building failure in the years to come."

However, Republic, which campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy, called for an "independent inquiry and full disclosure" into the use of taxpayers' money.

The group said on Twitter: "Royal attitude always the same: it's theirs to use and ours to pay for. Time we took the palace back and turned it into a world class museum."

The Treasury said an "urgent overhaul" of the palace was needed to prevent the risk of fire, flood and damage to both the building and the priceless Royal Collection of art belonging to the nation.

Pointing to the damage Windsor Castle had suffered from a fire in 1992, the Treasury said: "The restoration took more than five years, and it is estimated that similar damage to Buckingham Palace could cost up to £250m for a single wing."

According to the Royal Household, the palace's boilers are more than 33 years old and spare parts for them are difficult to source.

Much of the wiring is considered to have the "very real risk of fire and failure", while the majority of the mechanical and electrical systems are at least 40 years old with failure an "ever increasing risk", it said.

On Friday night, Bob Dylan closed out his set at Desert Trip with the 1963 song "Masters of War," one of the most potent songs of his "protest" era. Given the state of world affairs and the painfully frightening candidacy of the Republican Party's nominee, it was no less powerful than when he performed it at the Newport Folk Festival, more than 50 years ago.

Dylan's lyrics—which this morning earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature for, in the words of the Stockholm-based committee, "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"—have stood the test of time, inspiring writers from Lennon and McCartney to Joyce Carol Oates and have consistently reflected upon and appraised the world we live in with an unflinching, writer's eye.

Still, immediately there was a backlash.

Fans of the writer Philip Roth, who had been a favorite to win this year, cried foul, and there was immediate disappointment on social media that the American novelist Don DeLillo, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, the Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and, especially, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, didn't make the cut. But while oddsmakers over the past few weeks had put Dylan's chances of winning at 50:1—and each of those writers is deserving in their own way—there's no doubting Dylan was the right choice.

"Bob Dylan changed everything about songwriting," the musician Rodney Crowell told me earlier this year. "The first time I heard Bob Dylan was 'Subterranean Homesick Blues.' I easily played it 20 times—no exaggeration. It was a day or so later before I got deeper into 'Mr. Tambourine Man' and 'It's Alright Ma.' [His music was] infused with something otherworldly that portended a new paradigm."

By example, Bob Dylan gave popular music—the late-20th Century's most vibrant art form—permission to say something.

Indeed, it was Dylan who inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney, perhaps his only songwriting rivals of the past 50 years, to greater heights when he met The Beatles in August 1964 during the band's first American tour and challenged them on the content of their lyrics. Lennon in particular—who, along with George Harrison, had been obsessed with Dylan's Freewheelin' album—took the criticism to heart, and immediately set about writing "No Reply" and "I'm a Loser." Later, writing with McCartney, "Help!," "In My Life," "For No One," "A Day in the Life," "Penny Lane," and countless others followed. But without Dylan's template, it's hard to imagine those songs, or the entire songbooks of everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell to Beck and Strummer and Jones, would exist.

Dylan had found his own voice in the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, French symbolists like Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, and the rich and powerful music of Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie. But as his worldview grew and his restless creative mind developed, Dylan found deeper inspiration in Beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, not to mention masters like his namesake Dylan Thomas.

In other words, the literary has always been there; certainly more than for any other songwriter. You can put his lyrics up against anything by any of the authors on the Nobel committee's shortlist and see immediately why Dylan received the award, which puts him in a league with previous winners like Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Gabriel García Márquez, for work as "a great poet in the English-speaking tradition" on par with Homer and Sappho.

There's something else at work here, too. The Nobel committee has always looked favorably on artists whose work both reflects and responds to the important cultural issues of the day, and there's perhaps no one alive who has consistently reflected the world around us more than Bob Dylan.

He may not have invented the protest song, but Bob Dylan surely perfected and elevated it. And that he continues to tour—virtually non-stop since the late-1980s as a traveling troubadour, delivering his message of love and loss and a world coming apart at the seams, all the while revitalizing the art form of the traditional American song almost single-handedly—is reason enough to hold your tongue if the writer you favored to win was overlooked.

But here's the real crux of it: the future legacies of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo and all the others favored to win the literary prize are uncertain; maybe they will be read and studied, or perhaps literary footnotes at best. Bob Dylan, however, will still inspire global culture in a variety of forms—from fiction, to poetry, to film, to song. That we lived in the time that he walked amongst us, and gave us so much, is all you need to know about why the Nobel Academy made the right choice.

In the 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci painted his Mona Lisa, the image has taken on different roles for viewers. Kelly Grovier looks at its latest incarnation.

Can art mean anything we want it to? A cameo appearance made this week by the Mona Lisa during a march through the streets of Poland to protest proposed legislation that would ban abortion in every circumstance (even when the mother’s life is in danger), raises an intriguing cultural question: are some works so elastic and so ambiguous they can express whatever messages we wish to attach to them? Rather than the jostling placards emblazoned with the slogan “Moja macica, mój wybór” (“My uterus, my choice”) that many of their fellow protesters carried, a pair of activists are seen hoisting into drizzly air a larger-than-life-size reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait of the Florentine woman Lisa del Giocondo – as if her patiently folded arms and indecipherable smile could more eloquently express their dissent.

We now know that the participants in the nationwide ‘Black Monday’ strike have succeeded in persuading lawmakers to reverse course and to abandon their highly contentious legislation. But was Lisa misappropriated by protesters, made to stand for ideas and ideals to which she (and the artist who painted her) may never have subscribed? Examining the painting through the narrowest of historical lenses, one could peevishly query the wisdom of recruiting her as a poster child. Many scholars now suspect that Lisa was, herself, likely pregnant when she sat for da Vinci’s portrait. In 2006, a team of researchers using 3D imaging on the likeness revealed the time-worn presence of a gauzy garment known as a guarnello – a kind of veil worn by Italian Renaissance women who were expecting.

But great art transcends the conditions of its making and in the half millennium since the portrait was created, the Mona Lisa has woven herself delicately but indelibly into the popular imagination. To look through the archives of 16th-Century Florence for evidence of contemporary attitudes to abortion to determine whether Lisa would have approved of the objectives of the Black Monday strike would risk obtusely demoting da Vinci’s masterpiece to an ephemeral caption – a footnote tethered to a single time and place. (For those keen to know: it’s unlikely that Lisa or her generation would have regarded the procedure as an illegal offence. “The law codes of Florence,” in this period, according to Nicholas Terpstra, professor of history at the University of Toronto, “make no mention of abortion, and certainly do not cast it as a punishable form of homicide”.)

The appropriation of the Mona Lisa by Polish activists this week merely reaffirms her status as among the most inexhaustible, indomitable, and endlessly convertible of icons. Her ability to survive kidnapping (the painting was stolen in 1911 and was missing for two years), repeated parody (Marcel Duchamp famously affixed a mischievous moustache on her in 1919 above the initials “LHOOQ”, which form the phrase “she’s got a hot arse”, when read out in French), and celebrity-scale scrutiny for centuries, has given her countenance a mysterious cartography – a map that can lead us anywhere we want to go.

McCartney was joined on the blue carpet by Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr, John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison, widow of George.

"We're getting great memories obviously of playing with John and George," McCartney told reporters.

"So that's very emotional and very special to see that again."

McCartney revealed that he was wearing the same jacket as he had worn at the premiere of The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night in 1964. He was joined at the premiere by his wife Nancy Shevell and daughter, fashion designer Stella McCartney, while Starr was accompanied by his wife Barbara Bach.

Starr described the Beatles' lasting fame as "beautiful". "People love the Beatles," he said. "We happen to be two of them and here we are."

Other guests at the premiere included the film's director, Ron Howard, Madonna, and TV presenter and pianist Jools Holland.

Eight Days a Week, which mixes archive footage with new interviews with McCartney and Starr, chronicles the Fab Four's rise from Liverpool's Cavern Club to the stadium circuit in the US.

Fans see The Beatles at work in the studio and remastered performances, including their legendary Shea Stadium show in New York, the first rock concert played to more than 55,000 people.

While there are plenty of laughs, the film also examines the impact of fame on the band and how The Beatles railed against segregation at certain US venues.

Olivia Harrison took time on the night to pay tribute to Oscar winner Howard's work on the film.

"We were privileged to have Ron Howard making this film," she said. "He's a great storyteller and I think he's learned a lot too."

She said it was "sweet" that some of the home movie footage in the film is from her late husband's 8mm camera.

The seasons of a love affair are played out beguilingly in this wonderfully sweet, sad, smart new movie from Damien Chazelle – the director of Whiplash – and the Venice film festival could not have wished for a bigger sugar rush to start the proceedings.

It’s an unapologetically romantic homage to classic movie musicals, splashing its poster-paint energy and dream-chasing optimism on the screen. With no little audacity, La La Land seeks its own place somewhere on a continuum between Singin’ in the Rain and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, with a hint of Alan Parker’s Fame for the opening sequence, in which a bunch of young kids with big dreams, symbolically stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway leading to Los Angeles, get out of their cars and stage a big dance number.

To be honest, this is where an audience might find its tolerance for this picture’s unironic bounce tested, coming as it does right at the top of the show. It takes a little while to get acclimatised, and for the first five minutes, the showtune feel to the musical score might make you feel you’re watching a Broadway adaptation. But very soon I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better, her huge doe eyes radiating wit and intelligence when they’re not filling with tears. Gosling, for his part, has a nice line in sardonic dismissal to conceal how hurt he is or how in love he is.

The two of them get a meet cute in the traffic jam. Stone is Mia, a wannabe movie star like pretty much everyone else, and while waiting, she is distractedly going through her pages for an audition she has later in the day. Chazelle, incidentally, creates a mischievous reveal in which we are later struck by the dull listless way she runs the lines to herself, and the passionate way she sells them later to the producer. I wonder if the director was influenced by Naomi Watts’s actress in that other La-La-Land extravaganza: Mulholland Drive, by David Lynch.

But she doesn’t notice the cars ahead starting, and holds up the driver behind her: a disagreeable guy in a macho convertible, who pulls belligerently round to overtake, scowling at Mia and receiving the finger in return. This is Seb, played by Gosling, a pianist and jazz evangelist who is living a scuzzy apartment in the city.

A little like Mr Fletcher, the terrifying jazz teacher played by JK Simmons in Chazelle’s Whiplash, Seb is a purist and an uncompromiser, a difficult guy to get to know or like. He is lonely and unhappy, claiming to his exasperated sister (Rosemarie DeWitt) that he is just playing rope-a-dope with life and fate, waiting for them to wear themselves out beating him, after which he will come storming back. Seb is fired from a restaurant, where the manager (a cameo for Simmons) is enraged by his tendency to favour brilliant free-jazz improvisations instead of the tinkling background music he gets paid for. But it is here, again, that Seb meets Mia, and then again at a party, where Seb has humiliatingly got a gig playing synth in an 80s-style band. It is fate.

Winter turns to spring and then to summer, and their affair begins to take off: Mia encourages Seb to find a way to open the jazz club he dreams of, but to prove to her he’s not a flake, he takes a regular gig playing the piano in a jazz-rock band led by an old frenemy of his. Suppressing his fears that he is selling out, Seb in his turn encourages Mia to write her one-woman show – that toe curling staple of the needy actress. But there is trouble in store: having been careless in what they wished for, Mia and Seb find that success and careers are to come between them. There is a brilliant scene in which a surprise supper Seb has cooked for Mia descends into a painful row as they quarrel about how their lives are panning out.

Chazelle creates musical numbers for the pair of them, and Gosling and Stone carry these off with delicacy and charm, despite or because of the fact that they are not real singers. The director must surely have considered the possibility of casting, say, Anna Kendrick in the role of Mia, who would undoubtedly have given the musical aspect some real punch. But Stone fits the part beautifully: something in the hesitancy and even frailty of her singing voice is just right. Both actors are also very accomplished dancers within a shrewdly limited range.

La La Land is such a happy, sweet-natured movie – something to give you a vitamin-D boost of sunshine.

The year of new Harry Potter content continues with news that JK Rowling is releasing three new Hogwarts stories.

The short stories will be released as e-books on 6 September.

The last Potter release, the script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is already the fastest-selling UK book this decade.

That was penned by the playwright, Jack Thorne based on an original new story by Thorne, JK Rowling and John Tiffany.

The collections of "Short Stories from Hogwarts" are called Of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists, there's also Of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies and lastly Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide.

Most of the stories have already been published on the Pottermore website.

If you're expecting JK Rowling's usual length you'll be disappointed.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is 640 pages. The longest of these e-books is 79 pages.

What they're about

One of the collections will "profile two of the Harry Potter stories' most courageous and iconic characters: Minerva McGonagall and Remus Lupin".

It will also look "behind the closed curtains of Sybill Trelawney's life".

The guide to Hogwarts will look more at the "permanent residents" and "discover secrets of the castle".

The third will look at the "darker side of the wizarding world", featuring the "ruthless roots of Professor Umbridge, the lowdown on the Ministers for Magic and the history of the wizarding prison Azkaban".

It will also look again at Tom Riddle, and when Horace Slughorn taught Potions.

Contemporary art made from decommissioned AK-47s has been seized by airport customs officials in Texas.

The artworks, bound for an exhibition in Houston, were made by British artist and military veteran Bran Symondson.

"Spoils of War" - a gun covered in $1 bills - "Beat of a Wing" and "Virtue of the Vicious" - guns covered in butterflies - have all been banned from entering the US, although the state of Texas has an "open carry" law, which allows people to carry shotguns and rifles in a non-theatening manner.

Mr Symondson, who served in Afghanistan, now works as a reportage photographer and artist.

The 2011 Amnesty International Media Award winner said the guns for the art were captured en route from Afghanistan to Syria and were no longer able to be used as weapons.

"It is ironic that the law permits US citizens to go and buy a new, live weapon which I could, in theory, use to create one of my artworks from, which then could technically be used in its intended form but will not allow my pieces of harmless art into the country," he said.

Within "Virtue of the Vicious" there are clear 7.62 empty rounds which each hold a filing representing the history of Texas, including a yellow rose petal which symbolises the yellow rose of the state, and a pink cloth with a blood stain to represent that jacket that Jackie Onassis wore when former president John F Kennedy was assassinated.

Maddox Gallery confirmed in a statement that the artworks had been halted at US customs and will not be released.

The same London-based gallery came under fire after it displayed a nude painting of Donald Trump by artist Illma Gore. The painting, called "Make America Great Again", was banned in the US.